Tutorials for newbies!

Can You Still Open Files And Folders As Administrator In Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail?

Is is it still possible to open files and folders as administrator in Ubuntu 13.04? That was a question from one of our readers on this site. Is it possible? Can you easily enable it? Does your old method work? Quite honestly, I don’t know. I really haven’t used it in quite a long time so I can’t say much. But I know it was a useful tool in previous versions of Ubuntu.

In Ubuntu 11.04 and 11.10, it was easy as installing a package using the apt-get command. Now you can’t just do it anymore since Canonical introduced the Unity Desktop based on GTK3 theme and up. Using our previous method, we had to download libnautilus-gkso GKT2 extension and store it in the GKT3 extension folder. That method doesn’t work anymore.

I don’t know whether it was my system, but it didn’t work for me. You can give it a try and let us know the result. If you get it to work, please come back and comment under this post and let us know how you did it.

When this feature is working, a new command will be added to the Nautilus context menu that reads ‘Open As Administrator’. This command helps you open files and folders as the system’s root or admin. It is very handy, especially for new users.

Instead of typing the command, for example, vi /etc/sysconfig/conf.conf from the terminal, you should be able to open Nautilus file browser and browse to the location (/etc/sysconfig/) then right-click on the config file and open it as administrator. It’s cool. New users loved this when it was first introduced.

So, how do you enable open as administrator in Ubuntu 13.04? It seems like our previous tutorial on this isn’t compatible with Ubuntu 13.04.

If you know how to enable it, please use the comment section below and leave us your reponse. The below PPA also seems promising, but after testing it for almost 15 mins, I gave up. It doesn’t work.